The cutting edge and the traditional thrive at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. The Museum specializes in innovative approaches to teaching with art from across the globe and throughout time. Founded in the centennial year of 1876 with a handful of global artifacts and one Albert Bierstadt painting, the Museum has grown steadily through the years. It now holds over 24,000 works of art, decorative art, and material and visual culture, and continues to expand its holdings with new acquisitions .

Whether with a class, with a friend, or on your own, a visit to the Museum promises discovery. The variety of objects on view in the permanent collection galleries changes regularly. In addition, the MHCAM organizes temporary exhibitions each semester that bring to campus exciting art from around the world. Visitors can always find the familiar and the new in the MHCAM galleries—artworks that inspire, confound, provoke, and amaze.

A nexus for faculty and students across disciplines, the MHCAM is a fertile environment for creative thought and intellectual exploration. To enrich the Museum’s programming further, faculty members contribute in many important ways. They regularly curate exhibitions designed around their courses and participate in our public events. The faculty also provides an enormous intellectual trust from which the Museum draws on a regular basis for everything from exhibition ideas to acquisitions advice. This is the nature of an active art museum on a college campus: a collaborative laboratory for teaching and learning with art of the past and present, and a training ground for students as they prepare for the future.